Like a Prayer Rock

There was no gentle, stinging warmth as light refracted and absorbed into the vastness of motion. The wind blew strong and frigid, conquering over the sun and reigning over the iced temperatures. It was nearly impossible to differentiate the cloudless sky from the bottle green, salt sea. Blues and greens blurred into one, with only one cold star blinding her sights, offering no sweet direction or meaningful salvation. Her rag doll self was tossed and turned as it tried vainly to stay afloat. Time was a trivial trinket lost to the numbness of her outsides and to the wrinkles of her insides. No recollection of who she was or of how she had gotten there stole the comfort of happy, warm memories to ease her slow, pitiful passing. No knowledge of ones who loved her, of those who cared, accompanied her as she sank like a stone into the bottomless, watery waste - like a prayer rock.

Two strong, strenuous kicks brought her lungs to their estranged lover. Tears rolled down her tired, once soft cheeks. Salt tears. A prayer rock was her only memory; the prayer rock she had received in the sixth grade that she had used as a doorstop. She was sorry for it; she regretted the only sin she could acknowledge - mockery of prayer. Salt water forced itself into her mouth, and she could taste the thick mucus in the back of her tight throat. A dirty, unclean, sticky feeling covered the entirety of her sore, weakened flesh. She was clothed in a bleached gown, perhaps a simple wedding dress, shoeless, too burdensome to be sustained above the sickening, swelling crests. Like a prayer rock.

A beautiful head of long, black hair swam around her, synchronized with her vestment. Opening dark eyes to the display of underwater fireworks, she watched through biting blight. Not being deceived by the false sense of suspension, knowing expiration was imminent, she spent the final tears to the unmerciful, malicious sea. She could sense her lungs tugging at the back of her throat and her heart beating slow and savage. She admitted the remaining oxygen to escape her thin, lovely lips in short bursts of bubbles that raced toward the still ongoing light show. Not as agonizing as she had believed it might have been, she allowed the salted liquid of life into the winged organs of bare, delicate tissue. No doubt the doing of her central nervous system, she felt nothing but the dissatisfaction of the unrelieved breath. The fireworks disappeared behind a crackle of static which in turn faded into darkness. She shut her eyes and smiled at her demise, relaxing her muscles. Like a prayer rock.

The tides carried her empty body until it found the solid, sandy shore, which she had never acquired in her last wakeful hours. Soon, her remains will be discovered by the Beach Patrol; they'll finally identify her cadaver and inform her will-be-devastated family and torn fiancée, who'll mourn her untimely and tragic death. But until then, she's still a pathetic, bloated bride, face down in the grainy, wet sand, on the shore of a silent beach that pays its respect to the loss of an angel with no wings, as the waves crash quietly at her cold feet. A heavy, motionless object. Just like a prayer rock.